Nutrition in Budgies 
I have had a mountain of private messages asking for advice regarding the nutrition regime I have now adopted for my birds. There are way too many messages for me to reply to them individually so this article is to address the many and varied request for this information.
In the meantime first let me tell you a short personal story. I have a cousin David, who is a beekeeper, if he unknowingly has bees that are working a Canola crop the chances are that his bee hives in that area will die. You see most the Canola Crops these days is GM Canola, which is genetically modified to resist insect damage etc. It is this natural insecticide the plants produce that the bees take back to the hives and poison the hive.
Do you know where your seed is coming from or how it has been grown or stored or has it been fumigated/contaminated???? I bet most don’t, most wouldn’t even know what country their seed is grown in.  From the messages I have received, many give detailed outlines of what they are giving their birds, and I believe that the majority are overdoing it, killing their birds with Kindness, if you like. I wonder from many of the messages if their birds ever get fresh water. Medication and supplements are good for the companies that are flogging the stuff, but do you know if there use is doing the birds any good, or in fact harming their birds.
There is a very big difference between: looking for birds, looking at birds and looking into birds. The latter is the most important and probably the least practiced in this budgie caper, many breeders hear about something that someone is doing, and just jump into the deep end without too much thought. Each aviary is an individual environment, so what works in one place may not work in another. Also what appears to be working now may gradually negatively impact on your birds, it may take a few years for the problems to appear, you got away with it for a while, but now you are trying to climb an “oiled slippery dip”. Fertility falls off, hatchability decreases, addled eggs is the norm, smaller clutches of eggs, Hens dying in the nest box, chicks not getting fed, and the list goes on,  I have experienced all of these problems. This is why I spent a lot of time and energy looking into the many and varied sources of these problems and the many and varied changes that needed to be made to help manage the problems.
I think it is very important to note, that we need to give the Budgies a little more credit than we do, they have been around many more millions of years than we have, they are survivors. They are capable of knowing instinctively what they need in any given circumstance; our job is to ensure that we do not get in their way, with what we are doing
 © Robert Manvell Please seek permission before reproducing this article.